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Navajo Blood Sausage is a blood sausage, very popular among Navajo Indians in the USA. The Navajo Indians lived in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. During the 1600's the Navajo Indians began to raise sheep and this animal became a part of their diet. The Navajo Indians in Utah reside on a reservation of more than 1,155,000 acres in the southeastern corner of the state. According to the 1990 census, more than half of the population of San Juan County is comprised of Navajo people, the majority of whom live south of the San Juan River.

 

Navajo Blood Sausage

Like the Irish, Scots, Scandinavians, Poles, Bohemians and others, the Navajos make blood sausage. Each group uses the materials at hand, whether oatmeal, wheat, rice or barley. In the Southwest, it’s cornmeal.

1 sheep’s stomach
1 quart fresh sheep blood
1/2cup stone-ground cornmeal
1 onion, minced
1/2 cup chopped green chile or hot yellow chile
1/2 cup stomach fat, chopped fine
salt and pepper to taste

Scrub the stomach well in cold water and turn inside out. Mix blood, cornmeal, onion, chile and fat, and add salt and pepper to taste. Put mixture in the stomach and tie off into baseball-size sausages. Leave some air space in each sausage to allow room for expansion. Cover sausage with water in large kettle and simmer for about 4 hours. Larry King, who shared this recipe with us, recommends that the boiling be done outside because the smell can become overpowering in a small kitchen.

From:
The Best from New Mexico Kitchens by Sheila MacNiven Cameron (New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fe NM, 1978)